Dragon Drive on Terul

By Wyatt McLaren

It was tough enough herding longhorns – an undertaking fraught with danger and hardship – to Abilene or Kansas City or Sioux City. So just think what it would be like trailing dragons instead of cattle hundreds of miles across the uninviting terrain of planet Terul.

But Buck Johnson, Skeeter Evans, and Snort Jones are attempting it. And if everything goes right, they’ll sell the dragons for a good price and finally be able to get off Terul. But things seldom go as planned – especially when dragons and Terullians are involved.

Think of “Star Trek,” “The Rounders,” and a little “Lonesome Dove” all shaken together and poured out, and you’ll have some idea of what you’re about to taste when you step into Buck Johnson’s life.

“Dragon Drive on Terul” comprises three short stories (approximately 12,900 words).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wyatt McLaren
• Release date: Dec 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301078097

Book preview

Introduction

Most of us love a good western and/or cowboy tale (which aren’t necessarily the same thing, but often are). We may be reluctant to admit it in the company of our cultured and literary friends, but it’s often true nevertheless. The wild and untamed settings, the more elemental characters, and the big struggles that really matter—these are the things that conspire to make us love westerns and cowboy stories.

It’s all there much like it is in, say, the Odyssey—man battling unyielding nature, man conquering beasts, man overcoming savagery, man against himself, man seeking a home. These are the ingredients of all good stories.

But in westerns it’s the setting primarily that allows a large, adventure-filled, moving, and morally (most often) unambiguous narrative portrayal of these struggles. Trouble is, though, the requisite settings have almost disappeared. Certainly, the nineteenth-century American West is gone. Similarly, in our modern, technologically advanced world, it’s increasingly hard to find models for main characters with the self-reliance and resourcefulness and rugged individualism that formerly defined Americans.

Of course, we can always look backward, return to the past, for settings and characters. But that’s been done—and done too well for the likes of me to try to compete with the big guns. Larry McMurtry and Elmer Kelton spring to mind first here.

So modern stories have largely turned inward. The psychological frontier is now the wild setting where the struggles take place. And that means something of a good story is, consequently, lacking. It becomes more difficult for outward conditions to represent or parallel or be emblematic of the inner struggles. The rough, portentous adventure—played out in a dangerous, unyielding, and at most semi-civilized environment—is missing. And, as a result, so is much of the fun.

Why do you think fantasy is so popular now? Invented worlds permit these struggles to play out unfettered by the constraints of familiarity and our quotidian civilized world. In the invented worlds of fantasy, where different physical and moral laws often obtain, you’ve got clear-cut good guys and bad guys, seemingly insurmountable obstacles overcome (or at least tackled head-on and forthrightly), roughly emblematic settings, and the sheer fun of adventure and suspense. But, although fantasy worlds permit the telling of a good story with realistic struggles, they obviously don’t lend themselves well to all the conventions of westerns/cowboy stories.

For westerns, then, the solution is to keep the defining characteristics of these tales, but to transplant them to worlds where the necessary settings still exist. And that, of course, would be other worlds within our universe—credibly depicted worlds where we can imagine such stories playing out. And that is why we have the sub-genre called the space western.

(There does remain one place, though—well, that is, up until about the mid-1980s certainly and maybe still—in our world where such stories can still be set. And that is the microcosm of the rodeo arena. It’s western, it has the elemental struggles, and the characters live big. So, that’s why in Rodeo on Terul you can see Buck and his sidekicks, always trying to make a profit and get ahead, competing in a rodeo. There’ll be bronc riding, korth riding, dragon team roping, and more—a unique combination of worlds and settings.)

Here we are, then, with Buck Johnson, as well as Skeeter Evans and Snort Jones, on planet Terul. Here, on Terul, the geography is uninviting, the climate harsh, the inhabitants verging on uncivilized and often truculent, the characters’ aspirations simple, and the struggles large and emblematic. So there’s the requisite rough setting and concomitant trappings.

You may have also noticed that the characters are in some ways just barely more than two dimensional and the plots swing (perhaps) too close to the clichéd. But that’s all intentional at this point because, most of all, everything is supposed to be fun—just sheer, unalloyed adventurous fun in a western/cowboy way.

And don’t forget that it’s variation within a given form that provides the opportunity for real experimentation. You want to write a love poem? Well, there’s the sonnet already waiting for you. All you have to do is use the given form with its set rhyme scheme and metric